How much Money my Game made in 1 month // Indie Game Revenue
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- Опубліковано 15 чер 2024
- In this video I go through how much money my game made in 1 month. I will also go step by step where all that money goes and how much money I get myself from the initial gross revenue.
⚔️ Mortal Glory 2: store.steampowered.com/app/22...
⚔️ Chambers of Devious Design: store.steampowered.com/app/16...
⚔️ Mortal Glory: store.steampowered.com/app/10...
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⭐ Twitter: / redbeakgames
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0:00 Intro
0:24 Wishlists before release
0:57 1 month sales numbers
4:05 Patreon promo
5:13 Actual profit
10:58 My thoughts on the numbers
15:19 Predictions VS Reality
18:55 Sales per region
20:08 Outro
Includes music by Streambeats.
It's always hard when things don't go as you would like, I've had a bunch of massive failures myself and it definitely sucks.
All I can say is this is a marathon not a sprint, so congrats on the second game and best of luck with the next one!
Hey! I'm following your Tuts for my game. Great stuff! Cheers. This guy seems super switched on too. I hope he gets a hit soon.
Thank you! I agree, that's a very good thing to remind yourself of periodically (especially when getting impatient) that it is indeed a marathon.
P.S. Love your videos :)
@CodeMonkey y is great to see how engaged you are with the community, I see your comments in many Dev logs channels
Thanks for releasing videos like these, you're the only person I'm aware of providing consistent updates on your full journey as an indie dev.
I am a customer of your first game, but this recent one was not my type of game.
I look forward to following your next game and any other future updates.
Happy to hear videos like this are useful :) Hopefully my next game will be to your liking also!
Auro, I appreciate the transparency you have. Your channel is a great resource for devs, doubly for devs considering game dev full time.
That's always nice to hear, thanks! :)
Thank you for sharing this info with us
Happy to share!
I smiled a little when you say dolar is so strong against euro cause ım from Turkey and 1 euro is currently 18,52 Turkish liras :) Granted Finland is much expensive than Turkey, still was funny :)
I believe you should become one of the best game dev youtubers. Your videos are so focused for game developers and I learned a lot when I released my game on to Steam. Maybe adding some devlogs about the updates of the game might increase the reach of the channel. I suppose, you already think about this aspect so...
Played the first game loved it, now gonna get the second, loving the videos and detailed data. Keep on keeping on
Hah yea, Turkey does have it worse... I am always happy to hear when people enjoy my videos and/or find them useful :) Loooong way to go to become one of the best, but I'll take what I get :D Wish it all just didn't take so much time... Hope you enjoy my second game also!
Again, a wonderfully sincere look at the industry. Good luck with any future projects.
Thank you! :)
Congrats on the successful launch! Your one month revenue is about 10 times higher than what my game made in 8 months lol.
Thanks! I was constantly wondering if I will come off as too ungrateful criticizing the numbers :D Maybe my goals are set too high!
@@AuroDev No, your video was great. Be proud of yourself.
Thanks for sharing this info Auro. I recommend increasing the price of your games by about 400% in Turkey and Argentina. As long as it's still a bit cheaper than the USD price people on VPNs will continue to buy it (in my experience.) Unfortunately this means that people who legitimately live in those countries wont be able to afford it, but at their regular price theres almost no profits from those countries anyway (at the risk of sounding like a cold hearted capitalist).
Yeah, I have been thinking about it... Changing the price prevents you from participating to sales for 30 days though so at least so far I've refrained from doing it. Maybe I'll do it when there aren't any big sales in horizon.
Yeah go and screw over native population because steam can't fix their system
This was really informative! Thank you!!
Thank you for the openness and the honesty, Auro.
Happy to share :)
Auro u are a good guy! Thanks for sharing and all your hard work. Keep it up!
Thanks you! :)
Thanks for your honesty. It´s what keeps me engaged with your videos, as it really helps me to understand better the reallity and to learn to manage my expectations. Thanks so much for all of this!
That's great to hear! :) Honesty and a realistic perspective are two main things I always try to aim for!
Great video! I appreciate you walking through all the different stats and how it compared to your expectations with your number of wishlists.
Thanks! Happy to hear that :)
Really insightful, cheers!
Nice to hear :)
That's really nice to get such valuable information from your experience.
Happy to hear! :)
Thanks for sharing this. Still pretty cool to have turned a profit after just one month of sales. Congratulations on your release!
Thank you! It's definitely not a total catastrophe. Just less than I would hope to earn as a full-time dev :')
Thanks a lot for sharing everything with us ! I hope the sales will bump in the "OK" zone soon, take care 💪
Heh, hope so too, thanks :)
do not be discouraged!
I am I started developing a video game 13,5 months ago, so far I have worked 938 hours. Thanks for the information you share with us, they are very useful
I'm gonna continue with gamedev, no second thoughts on that :) Best of luck with your game!
Great job i can't wait to follow along with the next one! I'll be releasing my game Dragon's Hoard at the end of the year. I'll also be sharing all the data!
Awesome! Best of luck with the release :)
hello, love your videos, seen most of them actually. Even the one short with your dog, kinda funny :)
Awesome, that's great to hear! :)
This is very helpful thanks for sharing
Good to hear :)
Thanks for sharing Auro! I am currently developing my own game "Dreaming Worlds" and I think it will be, financially speaking, not work out but the development itself was worth the time so far especially connecting to others in the same boat is something I would never want to miss. Thanks to you and some other inspiring devs I started my journey and I am really grateful for your honesty and the wonderful videos you provide ♥
Best of luck with the game! :) Luckily there are always great lessons and other benefits along the way, even if a game doesn't do well financially.
this is great info! I think one positive thing to note for you is that the row 4 and 5 difference is a one time thing it seems. You had to pay people for translation but if you do a second month video though the sales numbers will be likely way smaller there wont be that huge 7k chunk taken out after.
Very true! The profit margin will only go up from now. Will be interesting to see where it is at in a year or so.
I can't help but hope that somebody in the puzzle game/board game communities stumbles across CoDD at some point and the sales spike really hard. Have you considered specifically researching those communities for a few days/weeks and trying to maybe reach out to any "influencers" you stumble across?
I've tried to do that, but the results haven't been groundbreaking (will talk about this in the marketing video). I still got some places I could try, but I haven't had the energy to get it done - I should do it soon though!
Thanks for the video! Hopefully the next one does better for you!
Hope so! :)
Your videos are a real service to the community, Shame that C.O.D.D hasn't yet reached the numbes of Mortal Glory, Hoping that given time they will get to that level and your cost per hour will go up significantly. One question regrading taxes, Are you able to claim taxes back from the brought in graphics and localization or did you figure those into the (Roughly 10%) deduction?
Thanks again for all you do here, I will probably never publish anything of monetary value, due to very limited time for dev and bad discipline/procrastination, so you're already in the small percentage that can say "I made That" Congratulations twice so far great work :)
Also will be joining your pateron after the next paycheque, all things remaining as they are $$ wise though will probably change my channel name first too xD
Thank you! :) All the costs I use for the game are deductible (graphics, localization etc) from my company's profit when it comes to taxes - so in a sense, all the money I spend on a game helps me reduce the company's tax burden. The 10% estimate comes from many variables and will most notably depend on how much salary I take from my company within the year and how much profit is left in the company after that.
Very sad to see this, but I would encourage you to continue, if economically possible, as it seems to me you fit the role of a small studio properly. Some guts suggestions coming to my mind without reflecting too much:
- For the next project, choose a perspective and visual style, which is more "in your face!", this games lacks a visual hook, I would even say it is visually shy
- Go for a smaller project to increase the number of titles in your back catalogue and consider a developer bundle in the future. Don't rely on buyers, who trust in a developer, they are rare
- Build a roadmap for the next titles, where every title adds one or two major innovations and rely on existing designs in the other parts of the games. This helps you to grow technically, designwise and makes a path of growth readable to the consumer, which could lead to a close followership
- Continue to do these videos, I like them a lot
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I plan on continuing and I am actually already working on my 3rd game :) Will reveal more details about that in near future. Currently I am also of the mindset that smaller projects are the best way to proceed.
Thanks for sharing the data Auro! :)
Happy to share! :)
dont worry Auro, you can still sell your game to ps4 xbox, switch. Some publisher can help port your project for certain percentage of revenue. There is still mobile, ios webGl license if you like to put extra effort to try the market. The biggest advantages for you, is you own 100% right to your game. With that, you can do a lot of things. Good Luck Bro
That's true, thanks! Many options to try.
Hi Aurudev! Congratulation on your second release!!! I am really appreciated you on sharing this data with us. May I also kindly ask about the conversion rate from wishlists to sales by country? Like, does United States which buy your game the most also wishlisted your game the most? I'm sorry if my English is weird, it's my second lang hahahaha.
Thank you! :) Unfortunately there is no way (that I know of at least) to check how many of the wishlists converted per country :/ Based on quick glance, the wishlists per region pre-release seem to match quite closely on the sales numbers post release (f.ex. ~1200 in North America & ~1100 in Asia)
@@AuroDev Thanks again for your information! I'm stoked for your next video about your marketing efforts!
If a "hobbyist" game dev or someone who has a fulltime other job or someone who put little effort to his game was disappointed, that would be ungrateful. But this is your entire job now and you put a lot of effort into this game. So it's quite normal to being disappointed and trying to understand what went wrong. I agree, game is not a flop, but also not next milestone for you either. I'm working on a low-effort game on Steam and I'll be able to tell you if it is worth it probably in jan of 2023 (bc release date will be 2/12/22). I'm hoping to give you a nice insight about if it is a good thing to make low-effort games when you overwhelmed by long runs like MG, CoDD.. Until then, take care and don't go yourself too much please. Thanks for the video
Very true! I am hoping the next project will be better financially. Best of luck with your project also! I'm interested to hear how the low-effort experiment will go :)
@@AuroDev I hope you'll surpass even MG standards with next one! And thanks, let's see how it goes :)
Not everything goes as we hope but you Will get it next time. Remember you always learn and you have to fail to learn how not fail😊
True that! Fingers crossed for next game :)
Congrats on doing a little better than "meh"!
Heh, thank you :)
Thanks for the video as always. Very interesting insight.. I'm a bit sad for the outcome because I understand how much importance it has to you right now that's your full time job. I whished to you to do a lot better than this, but in the end the game was probably too niche... I'm waiting to know what's your next title and as always wish you the best!
Yeah, I was also hoping for better, but they can't all be hits. Hopefully the next one will do better :)
I hope in the next video Explain about marketing your second game Thank you
That's the plan! :)
If you add a price for the knowledge you acquired during the development you'd be more happy I think ;-)
Heh, that's true :) Could have taken the knowledge PLUS money though, but maybe that's being greedy :D
Any plans for Mortal Glory 2? I'd probably be going "back to the well" already after this one. :)
Maybe at some point! :) I do have some cool ideas in mind if I decide to make MG2.
Isn't the dollar being strong a good thing for you? The sales are in dollars, at least for me I noticed the steam payout being higher than usual
Actually... You are completely right! I was somehow thinking about it the opposite way :D Thank you, that's a nice realization :)
Seems the idea of shorter games and quicker releases is more and more attractive to me. Failing fast to adjust is what I'll try, after watching your video. thanks for the heads up.
I'm feeling the same way!
@@AuroDev Right now, I'm cutting down my game to 2 hours (middle replayability) for something around 3 bucks and see what happens. If there are not many bugs, I'll release another installment in three months. Then I'll repeat the cycle. Hopefully, with quick releases, it'll be easier to understand the audience.
@@Amelia_PC I hope the model will work out for you! The 2h refund limit might be an extra annoyance, although you would think that majority still won't refund if they enjoyed the game.
@@AuroDev Indeed. Those who don't refund are real fans and they are the people we should focus on. The rest is just an audience for other devs.
I'll keep you informed about the "failing fast" model :)
Hi Auro, can you please briefly explain how you targeted other regions/countries for your game? Do you need to have language support for that region to sell there? For example French language to sell in France?
Found this in case anyone else has same question: ua-cam.com/video/5A15n8lrpHo/v-deo.html
@@Ant0n009 Good you found that video :) You can sell in all countries without supporting their own languages, but adding more languages makes it much more likely you will get sales in other countries also.
Auro, I am a game designer at the moment and I am confused on how to make a successful logo for the game if you have any tips please share love your vids
If you have the budget, the best thing to do would be to get someone to make the logo for you (that's what I did with CoDD!). Otherwise trying to make something that "pops" is good to aim for. But I am not an artist either so...
how your 2nd game sells doing now ? can you make a video about it ?
Maybe at some point in future! Currently I'm keeping up-to-date sales & WL details as a special perk on my Patreon.
We all know that developers, even the smallest ones will fiddle with the expenditure for tax purposes. ;)
Were you using Unity/C++? I'm thinking if you are making non-3d games and need to get it done fast, that Python+Pygame could work well.
Unity with C#. I haven't actually tried other engines, but Unity feels comfortable to me.
@@AuroDev yeah just saying it might be worth checking out.
You can program logic/AI really fast in Python compared to the C languages, so I'm just thinking it's like the perfect thing for making turn-based games.
I've been using it and things have gone pretty quick. I don't even use classes in it, though I see others do a lot.
The lists in python are super flexible. You can put any data type anywhere in them, and alter their size at will.
You can also use C code in Python if you need to, using the built-in ctypes module.
Sorry it didnt go well for you. I was wondering - looking back at the 8k costs - would you say it was justified or would you make some cuts?
With hindsight, I probably could have saved 1-3k by leaving out some languages. That does not bother me at all though since in the grand scheme of things that amount is not significant.
It's a crime that creators give up 75% of their revenue for something THEY made.
Thank you for the rundown. It seems that you did "ok", even as expected so perhaps you need to reduce your costs. Could you have gotten away with just Google translate instead of paying out over 7k just for that and did you really pay that or is that just what you say for the taxman? Also the number of hours to develop, can that be shrunk down...was the game too ambitious for the amount of money it was selling for? Maybe make something smaller, simpler, faster next time, something that doesn't require loads of text or just publish in English? What determines the price you set?
Even so, from your figures you seem on track to make about $17 per hour over the lifetime of the game, which isn't so bad. Why does steam take 30% though, aren't other stores more competitive, like Epic and Microsoft?
And finally, what country are you in that you have to pay any tax at all when your pay rate for the month is only $0.44? Have you considered moving somewhere more indie game friendly? 😳
The $7k was art, localization, etc not just localization.
I was going to just dismiss your more understandably naive questions, but you seriously just suggested the man move to a different country to save on taxes? That is ludicrous.
The dev time and costs could probably always be shrunk down (up to 0), but without hindsight it's often very hard to know what are the right places to cut. For example with translations you could get free translations with Google/DeepL, but if the quality isn't good enough, you might get bad reviews & more returns that will cost you more than you saved.
I actually agree with making something faster next time - that's what I am currently aiming for. Making bigger games can have more impact, but I think smaller projects suit me better overall.
The tax question has many variables that would have taken a separate 30min video to go through so the 10% I mentioned in the video is just a very quick estimate. If I earned just that ~$700 each month, I would need to pay close to 0% in taxes. Finland actually has pretty fair company taxation as far as a I know.
you need a good lawyer. you pay too high a tax. bearing in mind what you do, you can establish a company in another country where the tax is significantly lower, while doing all the work from your country, many Russians have opened companies in Belgrade, Serbia, and thus bypassed the sanctions and pay a small profit tax, I think yes, about 10%, there is also Cyprus as an offshore zone. This is not against the law, but its "avoidance". A good businessman does not break the law but circumvents it, and a good lawyer does not lie but only manipulates the facts.
10% income tax is too high? Also, any person living in Finland have to pay income taxes to Finland if they lives there over 6 month per year, even if their company were in different country. Same thing with every other EU countries, as they shares the same tax treaty.
@@Fanaatti he could avoid taxes because his company would not have any legal ties to the country where he lives, the money would be in accounts abroad and through that legal entity he could buy real estate (on which he would pay taxes). choosing a country with very low corporate taxes would save a lot.
@@anininiqanitigun1378 It still won't work. There are lots of Finns, who actually make a company in Estonia while still living in Finland. This indeed is beneficial, as the corporate tax in Estonia is 0% as long as the money isn't withdrawn (compared to Finland 20% corporate tax). When the money is withdrawn, it will be taxed flat rate of 20% as earned income tax IF the person is assumed as to be located in Estonia (the same 6 month rule). However, this doesn't change the fact that living in any EU countries means that the income tax is always calculated from the country where the person is considered living (6 month rule). It's same with the capital incomes as well. Basically, it is only viable when you collect lots of capital for years (with 0% corporate taxes), and then move for 6 month, and after that you withdraw all with a flat rate of 20% (in case of Estonia). If you were to withdraw anything before you have lived there for 6 months, it would still be calculated with a Finnish income tax. However, this type of action is basically impossible, when you need constantly money for rent and food, as any withdraw will be classified under earned income or capital income. Even if there wouldn't be any taxes in that country, there would still be a liability to pay the difference compared to Finland (as long as there is a tax treaty between Finland and the other country, otherwise it would be double taxed).
What you have descripted might work when the person is from Russia, but not when they are from EU countries while still living in EU.
I think the company taxation in Finland is pretty fair actually. The 10% I gave in the video is just a quick estimate based on many factors that can change over time - if I was overall earning only ~$700 per month, I would be paying close to 0% in taxes.